Selling Domain Names for Fun & Profit With Flippa
One of the few methods of making money online that I hadn’t tried yet is selling either domain names or full websites…until recently. I just sold a domain name I thought I’d use for a small side business (an idea that just didn’t work out). It was a pretty simple process and everything went smoothly thanks to a few simple tips I kept in mind. Here’s a quick summary of my experience selling that domain and a few things you’ll want to know before selling any of yours.
The Domain Name I Sold and Why
The domain name I sold was blogsetupservice.com. This was an idea I had awhile back, maybe a year ago. The general idea was to offer small businesses in the local area some basic website design.
I figured I could use something like Wordpress along with the Revolution Themes or something of similar quality and put together a great looking website pretty quickly for local businesses and solo entrepreneurs. It turns out that this ended up being an idea I decided not to run with, but I still had the domain…and a pretty good one at that.
Where I Sold It
I sold this domain on Flippa.com. If you’re familiar with Sitepoint.com, they used to have websites and domain names for sale in their online marketplace. Members could log on and auction off their web properties and other members could bid on them.
Flippa.com is one of Sitepoint’s other sites and is the next version of that marketplace. Think of it as EBay for website and domain name auctions. The same rules apply – reserve pricing, buy it now pricing, etc. But they don’t nickel and dime you as badly as EBay does when you list a web property on Flippa.
Pricing The Domain Name
I priced the domain name based primarily on the name itself and the potential return on investment someone would get if they decided to create the type of business I had in mind – setting up Wordpress-based websites for small businesses.
I figured that someone would be able to easily charge a few hundred dollars per site to local business owners who were looking for a low-cost, quality site. It would have been better if I also included the amount of traffic already searching for the term “blog setup service” which I could have found using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Tips for Dealing With Buyers
I didn’t have too much trouble dealing with the winning bidder. However, I remember reading some tips on ELance and other outsourcing sites that recommend using the site’s messaging system for communicating with the other party. This makes it easier to resolve disputes.
While Flippa doesn’t seem to offer any sort of dispute resolution if that comes up, I made sure to always use their messaging system vs. just sending emails directly to the buyer, even though I had his email address. That way, if something shady happens, I can at least have a neutral party that can show the exchange that went on between me and the buyer. Maybe a little paranoid, but it works for me.
What I’d Do Differently
- Include Search Stats – Include stats on the number of searches done each month for the specific term my domain matched. This would give an indication of the amount of traffic the site would get from this term since sites whose domain names are exact matches for search terms tend to rank highly for those terms.
- Increase Website Authority (possibly) – Setup a landing page or bare bones site and drive traffic to it, hopefully getting some solid inbound links, page rank and authority. This would make the domain name more valuable even if the site content wasn’t part of the sale. However, this would be a longer term strategy than I was planning on in this case and I’m happy with the lower fee and less work in this case.
That’s about all I can think of right now. Like I said, it was a pretty painless process.
I plan on continuing this experiment with a few other domain names I have and even a few fully developed websites that I’d like to get rid of.
And I really like the idea of buying websites via Flippa, which may be part of my plans for next year…as long as they meet certain criteria, like predictable passive income, quality sites, good topics that are free of legal issues, etc.
But more on that another time…
7 Responses to “Selling Domain Names for Fun & Profit With Flippa”
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I have a Flippa account however not bought or sold yet. I’d like to start the process of buying domains and then sell finished sites through Flippa. I’ve found many nice domains are just not available and you need to purchase. I like the idea that Flippa has grown to a point of a significant number of buyers. In this way, you can get top dollar for your site.
Brian@Manual Juicer´s last blog ..Where I can buy the best orange juicer
Hi Kenton, was this site that you sold a brand new website or did it have some age? I see the domain is parked so I guess whoever bought it from you has yet to do any work on building the site.
Andrew@body health´s last blog ..How To Detox Your Body Using Lemon Juice
Hey Andrew,
Yeah, I noticed that domain is parked too. Not sure what’s going on with that, other than the buyer’s just not ready to start working on it yet.
To answer your question, that domain was about a year old if I remember correctly. And when I started working on it, it ranked fairly well for “blog setup service” (or course) and a few other keywords. It used to be a Wordpress site, but I took that site down quite a few months before selling the domain name, so whatever rankings it used to have were long gone by then. Had I thought about selling it back then, I would have tried to maintain the rankings in order to hopefully sell it for a bit more. But like they say, hindsight is 20/20 and I’m pretty happy with what I got for it anyway.
Hope that helps.
Kenton
Thanks for the answer. I was under the impression that domain flipping was really only of any value if you had a top notch domain (i.e. something like cruises.com) or it had some real age. Obviously note – time to flip some of older, low PR sites
Andrew,
It certainly helps to have a premium top-level domain name like the one you mentioned. But if you look at the auction listing for that domain I used in the example, you’ll see that I also tried to do a fairly decent job of showing the buyer the value in the domain name.
Helping the buyer see the potential in a domain name, the number of people searching for that topic, the ability to easily rank in the search engines for people searching for those terms, etc. can all go a long way to boosting the perceived value in your domain names.
And I truly think someone could get more than their money’s worth by taking that domain name and offering a solid blog setup service. I’d bet they could recoup their costs with one or two clients. It’s just a business (and business model) that I’m no longer interested in pursuing myself.
Hi Kenton,
Any chance you can give us an idea how much you managed to sell the domain for? I read the article but couldn’t see a sum. Just interested to see.
I tried selling some domains a year or two ago without success so I installed Wordpress on them, added some unique articles and built up a bit of residual traffic to them. They sold far quicker then, though by targeting the right keywords it really only took a few hours of my time to do that extra work.
Richard@How To Make Money Online´s last blog ..Split Testing With Wordpress
Richard,
The domain I sold ended up having a winning bid of $150. Not a huge amount, but considering the cost of your typical domain name for just one year, not a bad return on investment. But I also tried to give the buyer a pretty good idea of how they could recoup they’re cost from purchasing the domain name, though it doesn’t appear that the buyers has done much with the domain yet.
I think your idea is also pretty solid. A domain name is much more valuable when there’s already traffic coming to the site, even if it’s just a trickle. The less work a potential buyer has to do to get a site profitable, the more it will sell for (of course). Getting that first bit of traffic is the first step and can make your domains much more attractive to potential buyers when compared to just some random domain, parked and with zero traffic.